Google Now For Desktop No Longer Only Available To Canary builds, Chrome Beta Access opens This Week

Google Now is one of the better features to come to Android in the past couple years, and only now are we just seeing the feature start to appear on other devices that use Chrome. Previously, if you were accessing canary builds of Chrome on a device that runs Chrome OS, Windows, or Mac, you had access to the alpha stages of development of Google's intuitive search feature that has embedded card based notifications. We're all probably very used to seeing and using this on our Android smartphones at this point, and it's a very useful feature to have. The good news for those of you that had no desire to dip your toe into the waters of the early development stages of this feature for Desktop versions of Chrome, is that it'll be coming to Chrome Beta this week.

If you have been itching to give Google Now for Chrome a try, there's no longer any need to worry about having to muck around with unstable early versions of the feature. It's simple to use the Google Now cards within Chrome beta too. All you have to do is look for the tiny bell icon in your system tray, and look through the relevant cards that give you the same information and notifications you would see on any of your Android devices. To do this you'll first have to go and download the Chrome Beta, and then you'll want to make sure that you're signed into the Chrome Beta browser with the same email that has Google Now set up on your Android devices. Once this is done you should see the bell icon pop up under active notification area icons in the taskbar.

So far there's been no mention from Google on when we can expect this feature to be ready for Prime Time, which means for now the rest of us will have to settle for using it in beta form just like the early adopters did with the canary build. If you're using this in Chrome already, how do you like it so far? Do you find it useful to have the same notification cards on your Desktop screen as you do on your Android device?

Lover of food, craft beer, movies, travel, and all things tech. Video games have always been a passion of his due to their ability to tell incredible stories, and home automation tech is the next big interest, in large part because of the Philips Hue integration with Razer Chroma. Current Device: Google Pixel.